It’s a tech preview, so be aware that it isn’t production quality yet. We have played with it a bit, so it definitely works. But as it is a tech preview, don’t expect support.

Madde is a command line tool, but the documentation should clarify how to get started and answer the most common questions.

We would like to hear what you think of it though! There is a component in the Developer platform product in Bugzilla called Madde for any bugs that come up. And we’ll be creating a thread on talk also, where you can give feedback. The team that made Madde is very interested in what you think about the tool.

You can fetch Madde from here. There’s also a .deb package in the downloads to provide a nice way to interface the N900 from Madde. It’s also in development, so don’t expect eye-candy yet.

The idea with Madde is to smooth the way for new developers to shift into Maemo.

The idea is that with Madde you can compile your stuff on your own machine without scratchbox, thus taking away the pain of setting scratchbox up in the first place. Not to mention that setup for Madde is simple, just run the installer and read the instructions while everything is put in place.

The toolkit contains the Qt 4.5 libraries by default. So you can work with Qt directly, no additional downloading needed.